The bMighty Blog -- Apple

There are quite a few ways for Macintosh users to run Windows applications from their Mac, without having to reboot their machine into Windows using Apple's BootCamp software. Some of these other approaches are very familiar, but they're not the only solutions.

The ways that get the most publicity are based on virtualization. VMware for the Mac and Parallels are both excellent solutions, and I honestly can't recommend one over the other. If your goal is to run a genuine copy of Windows on your Mac, at the same time as running Mac OS X, both VMware and Parallels do an outstanding job.

There are other options, for Mac users who only need to run Windows applications occasionally — say, you sometimes need to get into a specific corporate application, or you have to access one ActiveX-based site under Internet Explorer. For those users, the cost of buying VMware/Parallels and licensing a copy of Windows 2000/XP/Vista is overkill.

For those users, there are two good options. One is to log into an unused Windows desktop over the network using Remote Desktop Connection, a free piece of software from Microsoft. We keep one unused Windows box on the network for exactly that purpose. You can download it from Microsoft's Mactopia site. (I also use Remote Desktop Connection to remotely log into our Windows servers.)

The final solution is a new one, called 2X ApplicationServer. At first glance 2X appears similar to Remote Desktop Connection, as it also provides desktop access to a remote Windows system, instead of installing Windows on the Mac. However, 2X lets may Mac users work with a remote Windows Server at a time, each with her or her own account, desktop and applications. In other words, the 2X solution scales across a business much better than Remote Desktop Connection. Check it out!

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